English
) and the TurTya () literally the fourth state of the soul,—to which is sometimes added a fifth state, the nnmam , or the ecstatic state proper, which is but the fourth state ‘ arrived at maturity.’ Now the world of waking consciousness which is regarded as my real world depends on the presumed oneness of my self as knower with the body and sense-organs, and, likewise, activity is not possible except on the supposed continuity between the self and the body.* The waking state is that in which knowledge is occasioned by the activity of the sense-organs.f The dreaming state is one in which there is produced an immediate perception of objects in independence of sensations.:}: In the language of modern psychology, it is to be called non-sensuous perception, sensations not being the conditio sine qua non of perception ac¬ cording to the logic of the Vedanta. § The attempt to account for this perceptual factor of dream- * wraatrswrl imuNrogrtrir:”-* Samkara’s Introduction to the Com. on V.S. t airow *ro ipRiiaHIHinim — Vedanta-j>aribha$d, Chap. VII. § nfinftunwt n*n—Vedanta-parihbdqa, Chap. I. PROM AUTHORITY TO FREEDOM 85 experience as being purely memory-begotten directly runs counter, so the Vedantist argues, to such per¬ ceived facts as ‘ I see a chariot ’ or ‘ I saw the chariot in the dream.’* The explanation is further confirmed by quotation from the Sruti which also testifies to the creation of ‘ chariots ’ and ‘ teams ’ (of horses, etc.) during dreams. No longer weighed down by the ballast of sensations and freed from the yoke of the body, together with all its earthly freights, the soul regains that creative spontaneity which was circumscribed within certain well-defined limits on the waking plane. The objective control which is the very differentia of our waking life (barring out the cases of ‘ play-consciousness ’ ‘ imagination ’ and ‘ reverie ’ wherein such control is partially held in abeyance) is here reduced to the minimum and the soul of the dreamer enjoys an ‘ uncharted freedom ’ in the matter of creating its own object. But that is no reason why the dream¬ world should be discounted as altogether unreal and worthless. My real world—the world of normal waking consciousness—is also, as Samkarat and modern philosophy insist alike, a construction, limited in range but none the less indispensable. Thus my waking world does not score a point in advance of my dreaming world on that count alone. Samkara apparently presents the latter in a rather unfavourable light as compared with the former in ftthmrifc— ibid. t Vide his Introduction to the Commentary on V. S. 86 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OP THE VEDANTA respect of its truth-value. In commenting on the Vedanta-sutra*—Samkara observes that “the dream-experience is (altogether illusory as it is) not expressive of itself through the instrumentality of the entire set of the qualities of the real. What is here to be understood by the ‘ entire set ’ ?—The fulfilment of the conditions of space, time, causality and absence of contradiction. These, viz., space, time, causality and absence of contradiction, which are the attributes of the real are not applicable to dreams.’’f Now the paramarthavastu here referred to does not evidently denote the transcendental Reality to which the space-time-casual series is ipso facto inapplicable. It means the empirical reality (siwfish the reality of normal waking life —from whose standpoint the verdict of unreality is pronounced on the dream-world. It is interest¬ ing to note, in this connection, that Samkara recognises the profound discrepancy that exists between the spatial, temporal or causal relations of waking consciousness and those of dream-experi¬ ence—a discrepancy which necessitates the postula¬ tion of a different order of space, time and causal relation. For example, a man sleeping at a parti¬ cular space perceives (or dreams) to have gone to a place hundreds of miles away from the former and * III. 2. iii. t *r fv qrnfij* wr: i fit I on V.S., HI. 2. iii. FROM AUTHORITY TO FREEDOM 87 returned forthwith; a man in India retiring to sleep at night-fall experiences dawn in that very land: as also does a man frequently experience to have lapsed hundreds of years within the short span of a dream lasting for a moment. If we might paren¬ thetically note here the emphasis on the phrase ‘ the dawn in that very land ’ suggests that Samkara was not perhaps unacquainted with the fact of synchronous day and night in antipodal regions, as is evident from the Bhamati: ‘ the term Bharatabarsa is specifically used to imply the fact that night in the land of Bharatabarsa is synchro¬ nous with day in remote regions like Ketumala ’ (which is the name for a portion of Jambu island to the west of India). What these dream-experi¬ ences unquestionably prove is that in dreams we are granted a far wider range than is possible for us to acquire in the waking life; in other words, the dream-world is wider and more comprehensive, but whether more harmonious as well than the waking world depends on other considerations. It is a pity that Samkara did not evince a scientific interest for, and develop the implications of these, the study of which is so increasingly popular among psycho¬ logists of to-day. Perhaps it is the constitutional impatience of the Absolutist with the relative and the conditioned, that prevented him from spinning out further the fabric of unreality. One who would read between the lines would seldom miss that undertone of contempt that runs through his discus¬ sions of the problems of psychology or cosmology— the realm of Maya which has only a fugitive *88 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA semblance of truth. But this impatience, into which he is sometimes betrayed, is not in keeping with the interest he has taken in an earlier section of his commentary. ‘ The dream creations,’ as he has observed in that reference, ‘ although sublated as being unreal (from the standpoint of waking life), the resulting consciousness persists as real; for such a consciousness is not sublated on waking.’* Here the issue is mainly epistemolo¬ gical ; but the psychological side-issue cannot be ignored. So far as it is a fact of consciousness (wrffl:) — 110 matter whether it is a conscious¬ ness of things that are subsequently pronounced to be unreal—it has got to be accounted for psycholo¬ gically. True it is that Samkara has attempted a psychological account elsewhere, e.g., in his com¬ mentary on the Mdndukya but everywhere the treatment is perfunctory—possibly under the con¬ trolling lead of his absolutistic prepossessions. The mere mention of occasional concurrences or coherences of dream-phenomena with those of waking consciousness, f and of the power of prognosticating real phenomena (i.c., those of waking life), does not retrieve the situation. In strict justice to Samkara, it must, however, be ad¬ mitted that some of his observations in this context are eminently suggestive from the psychological * flwfM wi i rfv kite's IHwffii Com. on V.S., II. 1. xiv. t e.ff., in his Commentary on II. 1. xiy and III. 2. iv. FROM AUTHORITY TO FREEDOM 89 point of view. The dream-phenomena are called unreal, because they remain unto the last amorphous or indeterminate (^pff*rs*niR?rccr:) owing to the absence of a spatio-temporal order which, is, for anything we know, the only medium of empirical reality. As compared With concrete objects of waking experience, the dream-objects must, there¬ fore, be somewhat abstract, sketchy or shadowy, and thus come to be regarded as unreal. The dis¬ tinction may be further elucidated by saying that unlike waking experience, where the objects are given to us from without and ‘ strike upon ’ the mind in the Humean sense, in dream-consciousness the dream-objects are created pari passu with the very act of dreaming; or to vary the language, creating the mind dreams, and dreaming it creates. Excepting this difference in respect of an original datum or of a felt immediacy there is no such grave disparity as would justify a difference in kind between waking and dream-consciousness. Again, by way of eliciting the philosophical significance of the scriptural texts referring to the creation of ‘ chariots,’ etc., gamkara proceeds to observe : “ The dream (-psychology) has been pro¬ pounded with a view to clearly discerning the self- revealing character of the percipient self which is always difficult to discriminate on account of its concomitance in waking life with objective sense- contact and an illuminating agency like the sun. Had there been no Sruti texts bearing on the creation of ‘ chariots ’ etc., the self-revealing character (of the self) would not have been dete'r- 12 90 A SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE VEDANTA mined.”* The constant conjunction of the self with empirical objects on the waking plane may engender the supposition that self-consciousness is conditioned by, or dependent on, the consciousness of objects. The dream-consciousness has its efficacy so far as it dispels the misconception (by abstract¬ ing the self from the empirical objects) in accord¬ ance with a methodological principle which seerns to be very similar to Mill’s ‘ Method of Difference.’ The principle as formulated by Bhamati runs thus : ” What persists, others being excluded, is different from those others, just as the thread is different from the flowers (it strings together).”! This clearly proves that self-consciousness is not contin¬ gent upon the empirical modes nor is the correlative thereof, but is essentially self-manifest (^Rnnrrai|).